Poc chuc is one of the few Yucatecan dishes whose name says exactly what happens to it. The words are Maya and refer to roasting over embers, which is the whole method: pork sliced thin, given a short bath in sour orange and salt, then laid on a grate over charcoal until the edges blacken. Everything else on the plate is a condiment. Its rise as a restaurant dish is usually traced to the mid twentieth century, and the restaurant Los Almendros is commonly credited with putting it on menus beyond the villages, though grilling salted pork over coals is far older than any menu.
Around here it is lunch food. It turns up at the roadside grills on the Mérida road, at Sunday tables when someone has a sack of charcoal, and at the kind of family restaurant where the plate arrives with black beans on one side and a stack of tortillas wrapped in cloth. Nobody eats it late. It wants daylight, a cold drink and enough people to finish the tortillas while they are still warm.
The taste is simpler than the ingredient list suggests. Sour orange is not lime. It is rounder, a little bitter, closer to bergamot in the nose, and it leaves the pork tasting faintly sweet rather than sharp. Against that you get the smoke and salt of the char, the pickled onion supplying acid and crunch, and chiltomate supplying the heat: roasted tomato crushed with a roasted habanero, nothing more, so it is sweet and smoky before it burns. The four things are meant to be eaten together in a taco, not tasted separately.
Two mistakes are common. The first is marinating the pork overnight, which turns the surface pale and slightly mealy and kills the point of a quick sear; thirty minutes to an hour is plenty for meat this thin. The second is treating chiltomate as a cooked salsa with fried onion and garlic and a splash of vinegar. It is roasted tomato, and it should be a little lumpy. A third, less forgivable, is cutting the pork thick. If it needs more than a couple of minutes a side it is the wrong thickness.
Ingredients
19 items · for 6For the pork
- 1.2 kg boneless pork leg or loin, cut across the grain into steaks about 1 cm thick
- 250 ml (1 cup) sour orange juice, from about 5 naranjas agrias
- 2 tsp fine salt
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed (optional)
For the pickled onion
- 2 large red onions (about 400 g), sliced as thin as you can manage
- 150 ml (2/3 cup) sour orange juice, or 120 ml white vinegar plus 60 ml water
- 1 tsp fine salt
- 1/2 tsp dried Mexican oregano, crumbled
- 1/2 habanero, slit but left whole (optional)
For the chiltomate
- 1 kg ripe plum tomatoes (about 8)
- 1 habanero
- 1/2 small white onion, unpeeled (optional)
- 3/4 tsp fine salt, plus more to taste
To serve
- 18 to 24 corn tortillas, warm
- 500 ml cooked black beans with their broth
- 6 radishes, sliced thin
- A handful of coriander leaves
- Sour orange or lime wedges
- 1 avocado, sliced (optional)
Step by step
8 stepsFlatten the pork
Lay each steak between two sheets of plastic and hit it with the flat of a heavy pan or a mallet until it is an even 5 to 7 mm thick. You are not shredding it, just evening it out so the whole surface hits the grate at once. Thin, wide and slightly ragged at the edges is what you want.
Salt and steep
Salt the pork on both sides, then put it in a dish with the sour orange juice and the garlic if using, turning so every piece is wet. Leave it at room temperature for 30 minutes, or up to an hour in the fridge, no longer. The meat should still look pink at the cut edge; if the surface has gone chalky white it has sat too long.
Pickle the onion
Put the sliced onion in a bowl, pour over boiling water to cover, count to ten, then drain well. Return it to the bowl with the sour orange juice or vinegar and water, the salt, the oregano and the habanero if you want heat. Press it down so the liquid covers it and leave it for at least 30 minutes. It will turn bright pink and go from raw and harsh to crisp and tart.
Roast the tomatoes
Set a dry comal or heavy frying pan over medium high heat and put on the whole tomatoes, the habanero and the onion half if using. Turn them every few minutes for 15 to 20 minutes until the skins are blistered and blackened in patches and the tomatoes have collapsed and are leaking juice. Do not peel them. The black skin is where the flavour is.
Crush the chiltomate
Chop the habanero stem off and, for a milder sauce, scrape out the seeds. Mash everything together in a molcajete or a bowl with the back of a spoon, including any juice from the pan, until you have a loose, rough red sauce with flecks of skin through it. Season with the salt. It should be sweet first, then hot, and pourable rather than thick. Taste with a scrap of tortilla, not a spoon.
Get the fire right
Light charcoal and let it burn down until the coals are covered in grey ash and you can hold your hand 10 cm above the grate for only two or three seconds. Set the grate close to the coals. Indoors, heat a cast iron griddle or heavy pan over high heat until a drop of water skitters and vanishes, and work with the extractor on.
Grill the pork
Lift the pork from the marinade and let it drain for a moment; do not pat it bone dry. Lay the pieces on the grate without crowding and leave them alone for 90 seconds to 2 minutes, until the underside is brown with dark charred edges. Turn once and give it about the same again. Cooked through takes very little time at this thickness, and pressing on it or turning it repeatedly is what makes it dry.
Rest and build the plate
Pile the pork on a warm platter as it comes off and let it sit for five minutes, then cut it into wide strips or leave the steaks whole. Serve with the chiltomate spooned into a bowl on the side, a good heap of pickled onion, the black beans in their broth, radishes, coriander and citrus wedges. Everyone builds their own tacos: pork, onion, a spoon of chiltomate, a squeeze of sour orange.
Notes from the kitchen
- Without sour orange, mix 2 parts orange juice, 1 part grapefruit juice and 1 part lime juice, or use equal parts orange and lime. Bottled naranja agria from a Mexican grocer works and keeps for months.
- Pork leg gives more flavour and stands up better to the fire than loin. Ask the butcher for milanesa cut and you can skip the pounding.
- The pickled onion improves overnight and keeps for a week in the fridge in a sealed jar. Chiltomate is best the day it is made but will hold two days cold; let it come back to room temperature before serving.
- No grill and no cast iron: use the heaviest pan you own, get it very hot, and cook in small batches so the pan never loses its heat and the pork browns instead of stewing.
This is the standard household and grill stand version cooked across the peninsula, with the short salted sour orange soak rather than a long marinade.
This photograph was generated with artificial intelligence and may differ from the finished dish.